Pluto

Pluto and its five moons Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra.

Pluto is officially classified as a dwarf planet.

Pluto is about 1,400 miles (2,380 km) wide, smaller than Earth’s Moon.

It orbits the Sun about 3.6 billion miles (5.8 billion km) away on average, about 40 times as far as Earth, in a region called the Kuiper Belt.

A year on Pluto is 248 Earth years. A day on Pluto lasts 153 hours, or about 6 Earth days.

It has a thin atmosphere of mainly of molecular nitrogen with traces of methane and carbon monoxide. The atmosphere has a blue tint and distinct layers of haze.

Pluto’s surface temperature is -378 to -396 degrees F (-228 to -238 C)

The gravity on pluto is about six percent of Earth's gravity.

It is still unknown if Pluto has a Magnetosphere, a little magnetic field may exist or maybe not as Pluto's small size and slow rotation could suggest.

Pluto and its largest moon Charon

Charon is tidally locked to Pluto as is our moon to Earth that always shows the same surface (Near side)

Note there is NO dark side; just near and Far sides when viewed from the surface of Pluto.

Charon orbits Pluto roughly 19,571 Km center to center and Charon orbits around Pluto once every 153 hours.

Smaller Outer Moons

Hydra 65 km × 45 km × 25 km

Kerberos 12 km

Nix 50 km × 35 km × 33 km

Styx 16 × 9 × 8 km

Pluto has a diameter of 2380 Km and its largest moon Charon 1208 Km making it similar to the Earth/Moon almost dual planentry system.

The four other outer much smaller moon all orbit at much greater distances from Pluto.

Pluto surface features

Pluto is a complex and mysterious world with mountains, valleys, plains, craters, and maybe glaciers.

Features on the surface of Pluto

Pluto's mountains can be as tall as 6,500 to 9,800 feet (2 to 3 kilometers) and are big blocks of water ice, sometimes with a coating of frozen gases like methane. And long troughs and valleys as long as 370 miles (600 kilometers) add to the interesting features of this faraway dwarf planet.

Craters as large as 162 miles (260 kilometers) in diameter dot some of the landscape on Pluto, with some showing signs of erosion and filling. This suggests tectonic forces are slowly resurfacing Pluto.

Naming of features

Tombaugh Regio honours Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997), the U.S. astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930 from Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

Burney crater honors Venetia Burney (1918-2009), who as an 11-year-old schoolgirl suggested the name "Pluto" for Clyde Tombaugh's newly discovered planet. Later in life she taught mathematics and economics.

Sputnik Planitia is a large plain named after Sputnik 1, the first space satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.

Tenzing Montes and Hillary Montes are mountain ranges honouring Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986) and Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008), the Indian/Nepali Sherpa and New Zealand mountaineer who were the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return safely.

Al-Idrisi Montes honours Ash-Sharif al-Idrisi (1100-1165/66), a noted Arab mapmaker and geographer whose landmark work of medieval geography is sometimes translated as "The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons."

Djanggawul Fossae defines a network of long, narrow depressions named for the Djanggawuls, three ancestral beings in indigenous Australian mythology who travelled between the island of the dead and Australia, creating the landscape and filling it with vegetation.

Sleipnir Fossa is named for the powerful, eight-legged horse of Norse mythology that carried the god Odin into the underworld.

Virgil Fossae honors Virgil, one of the greatest Roman poets and Dante's fictional guide through hell and purgatory in the Divine Comedy.

Adlivun Cavus is a deep depression named for Adlivun, the underworld in Inuit mythology.

Hayabusa Terra is a large land mass saluting the Japanese spacecraft and mission (2003-2010) that returned the first asteroid sample.

Voyager Terra honours the pair of NASA spacecraft, launched in 1977, that performed the first "grand tour" of all four giant planets. The Voyager spacecraft are now probing the boundary between the Sun and interstellar space.

Tartarus Dorsa is a ridge named for Tartarus, the deepest, darkest pit of the underworld in Greek mythology.

Elliot crater recognises James Elliot (1943-2011), an MIT researcher who pioneered the use of stellar occultations to study the Solar System - leading to discoveries such as the rings of Uranus and the first detection of Pluto's thin atmosphere.